About this section

[Petari]

What I consider as 'true' preservation:  game (SW generally) in usable form, while original content is not changed. More precisely: no any messages in game, pictures added by some other (that's cracker, of course). Usable form means that it is copyable, writeable on floppy, or usable in emulators, with hard disks on original machines. Here we have copyright problem. Ideal would be if owners would give permission for distribution, keeping on sites. In reality, it is almost impossible. People tried it usually even did not get response. But for instance Sinclair Spectrum games are mostly free(ware) now. As result of someone's hard work and connections, I guess.
Who wants menu disks, intros added and similar - nobody here stops him. There are many sites with such content.

I want to preserve original SW, made with many hours of effort. It should be made by authors, copyright owners, if you ask me. But most is not interested, it seems + sources aren't preserved.  So, we are on STX images and sometimes only src. is some pyrate copy.

And then we are at problem:
As we know, there is a lot of problematic, corrupted Atari SW floppy images around - on sites, FTPs, user's archives. Not much is done about fixing, sorting it out. What I see is that people, WEB masters usually just copy everything, without even elementary checkings.
In Gamebase ST we have some bad images, oversized images, bad cracks and similar  too. Even Pasti images.
Sometimes in some forum we may see reports about errors, as it is here too. But what we need is organised overview of it, and place where people can find all known problems, and of course where people can add own experiences.
This is intended for that. So, plese write here :
If found that some game crashes, has corrupted graphic, sound, missing files and similar. But it requires some experience and knowledge.
There is a lot of SW what works not on specific configs. Mostly TOS version is problem, so please try if can with some other - it means usually lower version as TOS 1.04, 1.02 . With emulators peace of cake.
Report should contain:  game title, publisher/developer, year of first publishing, version if available. Machine/emul. on which tested, TOS version, RAM size. Cracker, menu disk number etc. Where is DL-able. Then concrete problem(s) .

See thread "Bad games" - there are some reports already.

Plan is to start online database, which will contain all known Atari ST games, and where will be known problems, limitations for them.
It will be interactive, so people can self add their expereiences. Will it be with logging, or not, I will decide by time and experiences with it. In any case, if someone is not sure, best is that write here first. Don't be afraid of making fool of yourself. Nobody can know everything. Point is not in not making mistakes, but correcting them and learning something, making things better.

I wanted to activate something like this at AF, but admins there seems not interested. Maybe this is not something fancy like Kryoflux or CT60, but I'm sure that affects much more people, and is something what Atari community needs for long time.